PHOTOGRAPHY AS A FINE ART.* Box a short time since,
there appeared an interesting work, entitled Life and Landscape in the Norfolk Broads, which attracted a good deal of attention for the artistic quality of the illustrations by which it was accompanied. It was written by two friends, Messrs. Emerson and Goodall, the former of whom was chiefly, if not entirely responsible, for the artistic portion of the work. This same gentleman has now published a series of larger designs, which he has entitled Pictures from Life in Field and Pen, and accompanied by a short and very dogmatic essay, in which he endorses the opinion of Mr. Goodall that photography has claims to be considered as a fine Art and "is destined to supersede all other black-and-white methods in bringing an extended knowledge of and taste for art, to the masses of the people." The contention is not a new one, and has been made with more or less vehemence by many photo- graphers of late years. It acquires, however, in the hands of Mr. Emerson, a certain speciousness, not from the arguments which he advances to support it, for these are, in truth, both few in number, and feeble in import, but because of the undeniable beauty of many of the pictures which accompany his text.
This artist—for so he is almost entitled to be called— has succeeded in producing, by the means of photography, pictures which have little that is mechanical, or, in the usual sense of the word, photographic about them. His com- positions remind us more of paintings than of any mechanical reproduction of Nature ; they show a power of seleotion and arrangement, which is an artistic quality, and so far support Mr. Emerson's thesis. But we do not think that it will really hold water; we should rather say that the pictures show us at every turn how inferior as a fine-art method photography must always be to any process which is natural and unmechanical. For no work of art does depend, or ever has depended, only upon accuracy of reproduction. It is a result of the action of the mind and the heart, as well as of the hand, and is born of thought and feeling, as well as skill. But in the art of photography, the operator is always dealing with what may be called an irresponsive medium. He is "kicking against the pricks" in every step that he takes towards the ideal. The instrument with which he works hinders him, and pulls him back at each turn to the actual. Are there incidents in the scene before him which are inconsistent or irrelevant for his pur- poses,—the artist can omit them or subdue them at his pleasure. But to the photographer these are rooted as solid as Stonehenge in his desired path. Not only is it that "the apparatus can't lie," as Paul Bedford used to say in The Octoroon, but that it insists on telling the truth. Worse still, it tells the truth in such a way, and tells so much, that, like a garrulous witness, it produces an effect scarcely removed from falsehood. For the camera sees far morethan the eye takes in at any given moment, and sees it with an impartiality for which there is no parallel in the human vision. We need go no further than Mr. Emerson's third picture, entitled "A Spring Idyll," to show how entirelyhis own work corroborates this truth ; for the picture, pretty though it be, of a cottage-girl sitting under an apple-tree peeling potatoes, is wholly unsatis- factory from a pictorial point of view, from the obtrusiveness of its minor details, and its absence of concentration and breadth of effect. We see also here one of the great defects which is almost inseparable from outdoor photography,—viz., the exces- sive brightness of some portions of the work, and the as excessive darkness of others. The reason is a very simple one. Human beings know they cannot reproduce in painting the whole strength of outdoor light, and consequently compromise the matter in various ways. They keep in their pictures the relation of the various colours, and by compromise render them as far as possible harmonious with each other. But the photographer has no such power of selection, and owing to the chemical effect of light upon the sensitive film, all equally illuminated surfaces are rendered in proportion to the effect on the plate of the actinic rays. The consequence
• PUIIMS from Wein Pisld and res. By P. H. Emerson, B.A., N.B. (Cantab.) London George Bell and Sons.
is, we almost invariably get spots of light and patches of shadow side by side, forming sharp contrasts which in the painting would be modified and brought into harmony with the general tone of the picture. The painter, knowing that he cannot accurately render sunlight, will—if he be wise— rarely attempt to express it in close relation with deep shadow. The camera has no such hesitation, and hence the sharp contrasts of black and white which are found in all inferior photographs, and which, in a modified way, exist even in the best. It will be observed that we have not dwelt upon the point of the falseness of tone produced by the fact of the silver film being affected to a different degree of intensity by different coloured rays, irrespective of their actual illumination. For instance, a red gown, which may be of the same value as a blue one in the painting, would, if photographed from the object itself, be represented as being greatly darker ; in fact, would, as a general rule, photograph almost black. It is not correct to state broadly, as Mr. Emerson does in his introductory essay, that the relative values can be rendered quite correctly by ortho-chromatic photography. Ortho-chromatic photography has done a great deal; bat it has not yet arrived at this result, as we have occasion to know to our cost, since but a few months ago we were forced to give up the reproduction of a certain picture, owing to the unsatisfactory negative which alone could be obtained from it ; and one of the same Fine Art Companies which aided Mr. Emerson in the reproduction of his negatives, happens to have been employed on that occasion.
Moreover, to continue our argument with reference to photo- graphy regarded as a fine art, it is not even correct to say that a photographic record is necessarily a true one. To look at it in the simplest possible way, if you take an ordinary photograph of any fiat-country scene on an averagely fine day, what is the result ? It is that the brightness of the sky—incapable, remember, of being modified by the camera—so overpowers the sensitive film, that in the resulting view we have simply white paper to represent this portion of the picture,—in other words, the record is true in so far as it shows us the illumination of the sky in comparison with that of the earth, with scientific accuracy; but it is false in that it reproduces what we see as grey and green, almost as black and white. The same remark applies to all photographs of clouds and all subjects in sunlight. The camera is capable of abstracting each separate detail of light and shade, and putting them down side by side in a way which is impossible to the human eye, which is comparatively defective, and, so to speak, blurred in its impression., Examine, for instance, Mr. Emerson's plate No. 8, a simple reproduction of sheep in a meadow, and notice that the shadows on all the sheep are, as nearly as possible, of the same relative tone. In other words, the values are, pictorially speaking, wrong. The same may be noticed with the otherwise beautiful photo, graph of " Crusoe's Island, on the River Granta " (a spot dear to the heart of every Cambridge man), in which the group of trees in the left-hand distance is relatively far too dark.
Mr. Hamerton, in his Graphic Arts, has a word on this subject well worthy of attention Photography does in some respects give more delicate truth than any draughtsman can, but from its incapacity for selection there are many truths which it cannot state so clearly as they can be stated in drawing, and it often happens that even if the photograph could give them separately, it could not give them together." There is the point, in that last sentence. It is the ability of the camera to give the separate and individual truths that is its most inartistic quality, for human beings, unconsciously to themselves, invariably modify, invariably look with some general idea at everything in Nature. They are never impartial, let them try ever so hard to be. They have not even (as can be proved quite plainly) the same capacity for seeing different forme and different colours. It is this fact which makes the variety of beauty and much of the attraction of works of art, this natural unconscious diversity joined to intentional modifications due to feeling and fancy. To quote Mr. Hamerton once more :—" There is one fatal objection to photo- graphy in comparison with drawing, an objection which far out- weighs all the others, and that is, the necessity for an actually existing model. You cannot photograph an intention, whilst you can draw an intention, even in the minutest detail, as we constantly see by the drawings made by architects of buildings not yet in existence." We have perhaps lingered too long over this point of the relation of photography to the fine arts; but it is, indeed—with no offence to Mr. Emerson—a more important and a more complicated one than he has any idea of. For if
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